Winter 2002 (Vol. III, No. 4)

Table of Contents

• Free Trial Offer from the Americana Exchange

• Note from the Editor

• From the President

• Tom Sawyer – BookWriter Web

• Charles Vilnis – BookRouter & Allusive Information Systems

• Genuine Fakes: Mark Hoffman

• Godsey’s Ravings

• David Klappholtz, Book Collecting from a Collector’s viewpoint

• Collecting Lost Race Novels

• Six Crises and a Challenge

• The More Things Change . . . Where we have been and where we are going in the Online Book Worl

• Eloise Wilkin – author, illustrator and doll designer

• Neglected Treasures – Overlooked writers and books

• Neglected Americana: The Woman’s Rights Movement

• Britannica 11

• Give Me That Old-Time Religion” or, Finding Your Way through the Maze of American Christian Publications

• Mystery Reference Shelf or Two

• Ephemeral Assays—The Good Book

• Fall 2002 MARIAB Book Fair: Good Finds and Growing Pains

• Midwest Bookhunters Book Fair, dePaul University, Chicago

• 15th Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair (SABF)

• Sacramento, CA – 9th Annual Central Valley Antiquarian Booksellers Association Book Fair

• Book Seminars International

• Internet Book Links

• IOBA Q & A Column

• Author/Book Review: Patty Friedman

• Author/Book Review Joe L. Blevins – the Texas Republic

• Lily Chen – AddAll.com Meta-site Search Engine

• Milo Parmoor – Bibliopoly.com

• The Aniquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) Database

• Jack Benson – Bibliophile.net Bookbase

• Brendan Sherar – Searchbiblio.com Meta-site Search Engine

• Reincarnation: Bookquarters to WantedBooks.com

• BiblioDirect Update

• Global Book Mart Relaunch

Free Trial Offer from the Americana Exchange

The online library is a searchable database of the best-known Americana bibliographies as well as some not as well known resources. Among the best known are Sabin, Evans, and Church. Not as well known are Bradford and Pilling. Then there are other types of resources, like the catalogs of Thomas Streeter’s collection, the Maggs Brothers catalogs from the 1920’s, and many volumes from the Depression era American Imprints Inventory. And, the AE will continue to add new references to the database at the rate of approximately one every two weeks.

The AE has taken a different approach to building its database than is typical. All bibliographic references are broken into fields, such as author, title, printing date, printing location and up to 16 more, before being entered by hand. The result is a database that can be searched by any of these fields or combination of fields, providing a highly-targeted result. This is in contrast to the scanned facsimile database which can only perform a keyword search of the entire listing, often resulting in too many off target responses, such as you get with an internet search.

The AE Database immediately gives the smaller bookseller, or any bookseller without Americana bibliographies or with an incomplete set, the tools needed to fully understand and describe his or her titles. It can save a bookseller who does not specialize in Americana from letting an obscure but valuable piece slip away for a fraction of its worth. However, it is equally useful for the bookseller with a complete set of resources, and particularly for the person responsible for writing catalog or online descriptions. What is now a long search through dozens of volumes takes only seconds, as the database scans all resources for results and comes back with a response in about 2-4 seconds. The cataloger’s job is then made even easier because descriptions can be simply cut and pasted into a catalog page, rather than rewritten by hand.

The second subscription service offered by the Americana Exchange is its auction notices. The AE’s bibliographers examine book auctions worldwide, searching for listings within the field of Americana. They then break these listings down to categories within Americana, roughly 75 in all, and post the lots based on this categorization. What this does is allow the bookseller with an interest in Americana to quickly locate titles in the field coming up at forty plus auctions worldwide, and then find listings within a specialty. A dealer who specializes in Civil War material can find material of interest quickly and efficiently, without having to search through dozens of thick catalogs and lengthy website listings.

The AE services are priced to be available to everyone, even the bookseller for whom rare books or Americana are only a small part of their business. An annual subscription to the database is $59.75 a year, and to both the database and auction notices is just $74.50 annually. However, access to both of these services is free until December 15, 2002, by simply going to the site and signing up for a free membership. While the open trial period ends on November 25, IOBA members and IOBA newsletter readers can extend the free trial period by entering the code – ioba2002 – in the field marked “Promotion Code” when they sign up for free membership. Booksellers can fully test all of the features before deciding whether to subscribe. To try the AE services or learn more about them, go to http://www.americanaexchange.com.

Mike Stillman

URL: http://www.americanaexchange.com

#AmericanaExchange

Note from the Editor

This is quite an exciting issue, to me. We have the development of a wonderful new (and easy) way to show our books on the web and increase our customer base, several new and fascinating articles to add to our reference department ranging from mysteries to religious works to a new online Americana reference service to the Brittanica 11 to an exploration of Mark Hofmann’s forgeries. We have coverage of several book fairs, and announcements from and interviews with several commercial book databases and book seminars. Plus, our first ever interview of a book collector—there is much for us to learn from the “other side of the street.” We also have author/book reviews: one on Texas history and the other a darkly comic look at family life. We continue the series on ephemera, start a series on woman’s suffrage, learn about Lost World books and authors, explore the works of some neglected writers and illustrators, and we get some good advice on bookselling and the internet from one of our own who is also an author, from IOBA’s president, and from the text of the keynote speech at the CO Book Seminar. We also get to “meet” the developer of an upload service that saves its users much time and sanity.

Of course we have more of Godsey’s Ravings, and we have our informative Q&A section. Finally, we learn about the talented people behind and the services of a couple of the meta-search sites.

All in all, enough to keep you reading for some time.

I hope you enjoy this issue, and I wish you all good sales and/or collecting, a great Thanksgiving, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year — and peace for all in our world.

Shirley Bryant editor@ioba.org

P.S. Take a look at our new classified ad pages . We’ve just started this program and you’ll only see ads right now from IOBA members, but it is open to all booksellers and collectors.